by Steve Weiner
My father made Barrault stand in the corner.
‘Touch his hand, Jean.’
I touched Barrault.
‘Now look at your hand!’ my father exclaimed.
‘It’s black!’
One night my father sent Barrault into the yard naked. He watched Barrault haul buckets of wet, heavy sand into the shed. Blue mist circled Barrault’s head.
‘Father, it is cold,’ I said. ‘It even rains.’
‘You see how he is, the Jamaican,’ my father whispered. ‘His balls.’
‘Like walnuts.’
‘Even in the rain – ’
‘Which is raining harder,’ I said. ‘And so very cold.’
‘How he dangles!’
We walked home. My father rubbed his face. Darkness hung over the bluffs. Green-white alkali fell from the leaves under the lamplights. We passed through the Protestant district, the tiny French quarter, past the fields. The bluffs were a big black block above us. The wharf was audible in a light rain on the lake. He tousled my hair.
‘Jean?’ he asked. ‘What do you make of négritude?’
With the change in light my father became restless. He spent more time at the Bon Garçon. He would rub his crotch, look out at the windows where the brown, yellow leaves rustled.
‘Just a minute,’ he’d mumble. ‘I’ll be right down.’
He went upstairs to Agnes Moosefield. Once I crept upstairs and peeked in. Agnes was a fat Ojibway with a skirt that buttoned up the side. She had turned against a pink fringed lamp and her black hair hid her face but she leaned over him, his long legs in khaki trousers.
‘Ha ha,’ she laughed. ‘I’ve caught him! Oh my – that little mouse!’
He kept doing that, all the autumn.
Our parents had their bedroom next to ours. We heard them.
‘Like this –’ he grunted.
‘Jesus – ’
‘Ha. Damn right.’
‘Jésu – ’
‘Yes – like that – oh, Christ – ’
‘Unh – ’
‘Uh – huh – huh – HUH – OHHHHHH!’
‘JÉSU-!’
‘Merde. That was a good one! Look at me. I sweat like a Pig!’
When the leaves blew our mother came down the stairs, brushed her hair, her eyes fluttered, and she fell. We drove her to Rutherford general hospital. Everywhere was white, blinking, white uniforms, windows. They put her in a white gown, like an angel. They slid her on to a steel table and into a big metal tube. At eleven o’clock that night she came out, unkempt, hanging on the doctor, sleepily.
‘I’m cold,’ she said.
We drove her home. The bungalow houses of St Croix were squat, cold, and the windows black. No one was around, just the tax inspector.
‘So very cold.’
Our father cleaned the house, washed the dishes, and gave her tea in bed. Morning came. Six-thirty with fat salmon clouds. We knew it would be a hard winter.
‘In fact, I’m frozen.’
She wandered into the living room and broke the dishes in the cabinet. She tripped over Pippi. She watched the morning star rise over the cimetière. She didn’t quite know where she was. Dr Lacomb examined the brain scan. Our mother, our pretty mother, had epilepsy.
Later that week Father Ybert came to have lemon cakes.
‘When you came to St Croix you were perhaps too young,’ he said.
‘Jack took advantage of me.’
‘He came early and stole the baby.’
‘Now he comes in me Wednesday, Sunday, Tuesday, Saturday, Monday and Friday. Like rain he comes and goes, comes and goes.’
‘Perhaps God was dissatisfied with Ignace and Jean-Michel.’
‘Morning, noon, evening. Like a rooster. Boom. When I least expect it. Boom. Comes and goes.’
‘It gives you no pleasure.’
‘None.’
‘Well. That is something.’
Father Ybert reached to the lemon cakes. She moved the iced butter closer.
‘Jack is a vigorous man,’ Father Ybert conceded.
‘He has the constitution of a goat.’
‘A rooster. A rabbit.’
‘He comes home from the prison, red-faced and breathing hard,’ she said. ‘I pray, Jésu, Seigneur du Monde, mon Amour Divin, from the depths of my horror you cannot forget me, I, who grew up in your house.’
‘But Jesu never comes?’
‘Only Jack comes.’
‘Suppose Jesu were to come?’
‘Big trouble.’
Father Ybert’s eyebrows raised.
‘Why big trouble?’
‘Isn’t Jesu also a man?’
The Galtieau Cement Works closed. Galtieau padlocked the fence. There were rumours of unemployment at the prison. My father eased his anxiety by going into la forêt. He built a sweat lodge and squatted hours by the steaming rocks. By accident I found him. He beckoned me and poked his teeth with the point of his hunting knife.
‘The Jamaican Barrault has contracted pleurisy,’ he said.
‘I warned you.’
‘Can black men die of pleurisy?’ he asked me.
‘Yes.’
‘Even like white men?’
‘The skin counts for nothing.’
Depressed, we canoed up the inland waterway. We tied up at a tangle of hickory and I carried my father’s sleeping bag on the shore. We got drunk on cherry brandy. While I staked up our tent, my father carried his rifle into the maples, shot a rabbit, and we marinated it in what was left of the brandy. We added garlic, thyme and chilli sauce my father had brought in jars. Outside the ferns smelled wet, black spores in the wind over rotted logs in the lakes.
‘To have power over a man, Jean, as I have over you,’ my father said moodily, stirring the embers, ‘is the source of an inflamed blood.’
‘I have it, too.’
‘There is a kind of lava in the brain.’
‘Do you have it with women, too?’ I asked.
‘It is a matter of the hard and soft.’
When we were through with the cherry brandy and rabbit we broke up our chocolate squares. It became warm in the tent.
‘Listen to me, Jean,’ he said. ‘If your mother loved me as she used to do, I’d build her a cathedral so goddamn high she could fly in an aeroplane down the nave.’
He lay against hickory branches, lazily rubbing his penis.
‘But she has made me a producer of tears,’ my father said. ‘I leak sorrow.’
‘Even Ignace.’
‘That hairless albino.’
‘She gives you no pleasure?’
‘I work in one prison and sleep in another.’
He became nostalgic.
‘Your mother was sweet-meat, Jean. Little bum. Skirt you could see up when she tied her convent shoes.’
He was drowsy. I brought a bottle of wine from the boat. The wind blew the tent flaps open. I threw out dead twigs and pinned the flaps shut.
‘You know where I uncorked her?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘In the Portobello Hotel.’
‘You went to the ballroom first,’ I said.
He giggled. The echo carried to the pines on an island in the lake. A hoot owl answered, lonely and still in the moonlight, beyond our shore.
‘Partially,’ he admitted. ‘I went to the Oddfellows Hall where she served the St Bonaventure fish fry. I slipped her red wine. I induced her to accompany me to the Portobello Hotel where I completed what I had begun, and with extreme – may I say, oceanic – satisfaction.’
He saw the disgust on my face.
‘The Portobello Hotel was not so run-down then,’ he said defensively. ‘There was a garden with tea roses. There was white paint on the windowsills. Municipal workers, fisheries men, came for tea and dance. But of course when they let in the Verhaerens the place went downhill.’
He got drunker.
‘I tell you she was tight as a pig’s bladder and warm as sour milk.’<
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He opened a second bottle of wine and drank until the red juice ran down his grizzled chin.
‘Squealed like a butchered pig.’
‘Papa. You excite yourself.’
‘Let me tell you, I stuck it in many women.’
‘Oui, Papa.’
‘But only women.’
He fell against the tent’s centre pole. I laid him in his sleeping bag. I put his pack under his head for a pillow.
‘I bruised that skin like lilies,’ he said. ‘I broke her teeth. I made her vulgar. Once I locked her in the closet and banged pots and pans against the door.’
‘You have suffered, Papa.’
‘That is why she is crazy now.’
‘Life is a sad trick.’
‘I even wanted to kill her.’
‘But you believe in le bon Dieu?’
‘I am a man. I believe, but …’
He chewed tobacco now. His teeth were gummy with it. When he spat, it dribbled down his shirt.
‘Bah,’ he mumbled. ‘We’ll be dead some day. Eh? Fancy that. No more Verhaerens.’
I turned out the lantern. I felt for the wine bottle. He groped and kissed me on the back of the neck.
‘One has such desires, Jean,’ he said. ‘One can die of such desires.’
I pulled the sleeping bag tight around his shoulders. He slept. I put out the fire. Fish broke water around our boat. I drank wine.
I made boats of yellow maple leaves and sailed them on a black pond. Suddenly the leaves parted. On a thick branch was an Ojibway corpse, crumpled on its wood platform, surrounded by liquor bottles and a transistor radio.
‘A chibay!’ I said.
I crossed myself. The wind rustled through the corpse’s long black hair. It grinned, because its teeth came through rotted lips.
Jean … What do you make of all this?
The Verhaerens went to mass.
Poles came in farm wagons. Germans came in business suits. The birds called, sleepy-wet. Beggars came out, our one-legged veterans of Korea. They leaned against St Bonaventure. Silhouettes flew into the skies, circled the French quarter, the unsatisfied dead, from near, from far, in big circles.
I fell in love with Antoinette Hartmann.
She lived in a yellow clapboard house by the railroad tracks on Stewart Avenue. Her hair was curly brown and her eyes were hazel but sometimes green. There was a crazy kind of confidence in her eyes. She was a champion ice skater. The buveurs followed her home one day. She walked faster and faster and so did we until finally everybody was running. She jumped up her porch, ran inside, and slammed the door.
‘That would have been some rape!’ Herman Pic laughed, catching his breath, bent over.
I craned my head back:
‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’
I followed Antoinette everywhere, stood at dawn outside her house. I saw her face on my stairs, in the Dybs’ smoke, turning in the air. She existed in a special way. I explained this to Ignace.
‘Makes no sense,’ he said, scratching his head.
I called her the Marquise. I stalked her. I jumped out at her from the oaks, my thumbs in my ears.
‘ANTOINETTE!’
One night I ate supper alone. Ignace was at a seminary class in Winnipeg. My father was on night duty. My mother was at St Bonaventure making cinnamon candles. Pippi trotted into the kitchen and when he bent down to eat I smashed him.
‘That’s what it is to suffer!’
My father unexpectedly stormed into the kitchen, grabbed me by the shoulder, and backed me against the door.
‘Did you hit Pippi?’ he demanded.
‘No. I swear.’
‘Who made caca on the floor?’
‘It wasn’t I!’
‘You blame Pippi?’
‘It wasn’t I!’
‘It could not have been Ignace. It is not aromatic!’
He yanked my ears, one for soiling the kitchen floor, the other for lying.
I invited Antoinette Hartmann to Uncle Artur’s garden party. Red peppers, wheat wreaths, red apples, a persimmon branch, apricots, little tricolours bobbed in the stiff breeze over his allotment on the bluffs. Berries flamed in la forêt. Maple leaves fell, groaned, and took root. Black vines on Artur’s wall blossomed against the purple western clouds. Teal and redheads droned over the marshes. Red lights bobbed with the trawlers.
‘Look at the belles!’ my father said, using the feminine for Antoinette and me as we came into the patio holding our lemonades. ‘Quelles jolies!’
My father sang in a deep bass:
‘Approche, donc, ma belle
Approche-toi, mon bien
Pour monâme apaiser
Donne-moi un baiser.’
Antoinette blushed, put down her lemonade, and danced with him. He stumbled drunkenly and sat down abruptly on a folding chair. She ended up on his lap. He rubbed her flat belly.
‘How much you pay for this, Emil?’ he asked.
‘A hundred dollars,’ Emil said.
‘Georges?’
‘Two hundred dollars!’
‘Two thousand!’ I shouted.
My father became overheated with drink. He threw a crumpled wad of Canadian bills on the table.
‘But only I have money, you shit!’ he said, nostrils flared. ‘Eh? What about it? Jean?’
My mother came from the kitchen. Antoinette went back to the lemonade bowl. Paul Hartmann spoke to Emil about a job. Georges sang. My father got out his red accordion. Antoinette and I danced.
‘Do you like me, Antoinette?’ I asked.
‘You?’
‘You find me amusing.’
She laughed.
‘Well, you’re so strange.’
‘Antoinette – ’
Somebody knocked over the lanterns. The dance was over. Herman Pic came with his date Edith Knobler. Danny Auban came with Sandy Gillickson. Strangers came, then relations of strangers. Gruel came, LeFèvre, Wils, Semml, Amboise, the French guards. The Zylches came, and Red Two Hats. Zena Courennes started throwing dishes, swearing. My mother sucked from the wrong watermelon and got dizzy with rum.
Pippi escaped and ran across the field. I brought Pippi back. Antoinette stumbled under the Chinese lanterns. Her weary, drunken, beautiful face grew transparent. Oak seeds twirled behind her transparent eyes. Everybody suddenly grew transparent.
‘Antoinette!’ I yelled.
I beat the snare drum like a maniac.
Rain, autumn, all over the French quarter. I went to visit Antoinette Hartmann.
I oiled my hair, stuck my jacket collar high, cleaned my boot cleats. A storm brewed. Leaves were flying all over the place. I could hardly see. A brassy light came from her house window and telephone wires shrieked. I crawled through the hedge and peeked inside. She stood on a red carpet which curved at the bottom of the stairwell. She straddled the banister.
She saw me peering in. Sweat ran down her neck. Her hands were white-knuckled. She pumped furiously.
‘I can’t help it!’
I backed away and tripped over a garden hose. Suddenly Antoinette’s house divided. Rain poured in, glittery silver, on piano, portraits, wax fruit, oval mahogany dining table. Yet nothing got wet. The lights never even dimmed. Antoinette went upstairs. After a while she came out, zipping up her black and white jacket. I followed her up Stewart Avenue.
‘I saw you in the storm,’ I accused. ‘The whole house divided.’
‘You had no business peeping.’
‘Your face was red, your eyes hollow.’
‘I was in a compulsion.’
She walked fast under the maples. She was embarrassed to be with me. I double-stepped to keep up under the swinging streetlights.
‘We were meant to be together,’ I said.
‘Us? Impossible.’
‘Antoinette, you don’t have to do anything – !’
She took out a steak sandwich, unwrapped it from wax paper, and shivered as she chewed, as though I had put a bad taste in h
er mouth.
‘I’m not doing anything with you.’
Three
I became a sailor.
I stole a ride on the Deux Amours. The freighter carried bleached cotton to Michigan. As I watched, St Croix receded through a porthole. The porch of the Hotel Portobello had crumbled in the storm and white water ran through its timbers. It was raining over HM Prison Swallowfield. The mines steamed in the dawn. Then Gilbertsonville and Heron Bay thinned to a hard grey line.
Lake Superior threw grey waves breaking. Pines whipsawed on dunes. The waters heaved. The dirty lake sprayed into the hold, over the cotton crates. The rain grew worse. I crouched in the dark Deux Amours and prayed on my St Christopher medal.
Deux Amours crossed Lake Superior, crossed the International Boundary, and came to Keweenaw Peninsula. We backed into Portage Lake canal and dropped anchor at Houghton. L’Anse Indians came from the grey wash in black oilslicks and carried drills and iced fish in flat containers into the holds. The freighter picked up smoked ham and slipped out the peninsula. It was night. I smelled stunted pines but saw nothing of the United States.
Because of high winds and waves the freighter was kept off at Marquette. Lights bobbed in the dark. About midnight the hatch opened, water poured in. A sailor came down, found me, and hauled me up.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, shaking me.
‘Canadian.’
‘Well, that’s a hell of a place, Canada.’
He dumped me on a crate of bleached cotton. The captain came. Two mariners, then three more, stood around me below the light streaming down the hatch.
‘Pourquoi tu es caché chez le freighter?’ the captain put together in French. ‘Why are you hiding here?’
‘I’m running away.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the woman I love doesn’t love me.’
‘If you’re looking for love – ’
The captain rubbed his grizzled chin. I stopped rubbing my calf, which had cramped. I pulled my trouser leg down.
‘There’s a Czech circus,’ a sailor said. ‘It tours. It’s at the train station.’
The captain blew his nose.
‘Get out of here,’ he said.
I picked up my duffel bag with its portrait of Pius XII, postcards of St Croix, underwear, my St Bonavènture scarf. I passed the customs and excise building. The rainwater was so bright that when I threw up it was in a hall of mirrors. There was a cinema with posters of a huge blonde, a lingerie store, a pornography shop. In a dark bungalow house married women sewed by a window lamp. High-school girls bent, going by, in the squall.